The electricity industry in the United States
accounts for $250 billion in sales, and demand for electricity is increasing.
The industry faces issues which make meeting that demand difficult. These
issues include slow rates of technology adoption, a transmission system
designed for an earlier era, a hybrid of regulated and deregulated
jurisdictions, and incomplete markets.

The problems of the electricity industry are
inherently interdisciplinary, and the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry
Center (CEIC) has merged engineering, economics, risk analysis, decision
science to study problems such as these current areas of research:

The Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center
(CEIC) was established in August 2001 after an extended competition sponsored
by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation among a number of U.S. research
universities. It is one of 20 centers of excellence in different industries
that the Sloan Foundation has established at 13 universities. Sloan explains
that it has funded these centers in order to:

"…create an academic community that
understands industries and to encourage a direct approach to the companies
and people of each industry for data and observations. We believe
observation-based work by well informed academics will, in the long run,
lead to practical contributions to the industries studied."

CEIC's core funding comes jointly from Sloan
and from the Electric Power
Research Institute (EPRI). Core funding is renewable in two stages for an
additional six years. Additional support has come from the U.S. National
Science Foundation, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Department of
Energy, Tennessee Valley Authority, the U.S. Office of Naval Research, McDermott
Technology, the ABB Group, Alliant Energy, National Rural Electrical Cooperative Association, and
the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Office of Energy and Technology Development..

In building CEIC we have been careful to
interpret the "electricity industry" to mean all the important
stakeholders including private and public companies, cooperatives, labor,
regulators, manufacturers and marketers of equipment and appliances, the
service and consulting communities, the research communities, all classes of
consumers, and state and national regulators. This breadth is reflected in the
make-up of the Center's advisory board, the current members of which are
listed on our People
page.

CEIC's primary mission is to work with
industry, government and other stakeholders to address the strategic problems
of the electricity industry. In doing so, CEIC will produce a cadre of
well-trained researchers, most of whom will continue to address the industry's
problems during their subsequent professional careers. Fourteen faculty and
eighteen Ph.D. students are now conducting research within CEIC. We have also
involved a number of MBA, MS and BA/BS students. In addition to doctoral
education, CEIC has a broad educational mission which includes the development
of university courses, special topic short-courses, curricular advice for
training programs, and similar activities. At the second meeting of our
external advisory committee, in October 2002, one of the members of the
committee noted that this makes CEIC probably the largest research effort in
the world focused on interdisciplinary problems of the electricity industry.